Not a Blog

It was a gentle ending for a turbulent soul. Not entirely unexpected. Harlan had been in very bad health since a stroke laid him low a couple of years ago. For the world of science fiction and fantasy — he always preferred being called a fantasist to being called a science fiction writer, and he hated being called a “sci-fi writer” — this is another brutal loss in a year that has been full of them. The same is true for the larger world of literature. Harlan was not just a great fantasist and/or science fiction writer; he was a great writer, period. When he was at the top of his form, from the late 60s through the 70s and well into the 80s, there was no finer short story writer in all of English literature.

Harlan was fifteen years older than me. He was part of a generation of writers who emerged in the late 50s and early 60s, a generation that included such giants as Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, Algis Budrys, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany. They were the New Wave generation, and they remade the genre in their own image, none more so than Harlan, whose anthology Dangerous Visions and its sequel Again, Dangerous Visions not only outraged and delighted tens of thousands of readers, but had an enormous influence on the writers of the generation that followed, my own generation. Those books blew the doors off the hinges in ways that might seem incomprehensible to those who did not live through those times; they opened doors to worlds and worlds of possibilities, to lands of the imagination that John W. Campbell and H.L Gold never dreamt of, and I rushed on through, together with most of my contemporaries. Writers of the Golden Age wanted to impress JWC; writers of my youth wanted to impress Harlan. He was a hero to us.

The first time I met Harlan in person was at 1972 Lunacon at the old Commodore Hotel above Grand Central Station. He read “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” a powerful story made even more powerful by his reading (no one read better than Harlan, ever), and gutted the entire audience. A few hours later, he moderated the New Writers Panel. The new writers in question included Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, a couple of Haldemans (I think), and Geo. Alec Effinger. Harlan did the panel as if it were the old tv show Queen for a Day, and had the whole ballroom howling with laughter. I’ve seen half a dozen panels as funny as that one in the half century since, but never one that was funnier. Laughter and tears; he could evoke them both.

I was a new writer myself in ’72, with maybe four or five sales under my belt, but nowhere near the stature to be invited to be on any panels. (I would have to wait another three years for that. I actually won my first Hugo before being asked to be on my first panel. In those days, you were expected to pay your dues before they put you on stage). Nonetheless, I screwed up my courage enough to approach Harlan in the hall and introduce myself. To my surprise, he knew who I was; he’d seen the handful of stories I had published by that point. But when I asked him if I could submit a story to him for The Last Dangerous Visions, he shot me down quickly and firmly. The book was done, he said, and would be out that Christmas. (Years later, Harlan did write me and ask me to send him something. I sent him an early draft of my story “Meathouse Man,” the darkest and most dangerous story I had in me at the time. He rejected it almost by return mail, with a scathing letter that ripped it to shreds. He was completely right about everything he said. So I gnashed my teeth, muttered curses under my breath, and rewrote the story from beginning to end, making it four times as long and a hundred times as good. When I sent it back to him… he rejected it again. He was not easy to please. Eventually I sold the story to Orbit… but though Damon Knight published it, it was Harlan who edited it, and helped me make it what it is, for good or ill).

GRRM & HE at WFC 1983

Of course, I ran into Harlan many times in the decades that followed, at cons and awards banquets, and even at his fabled house in Sherman Oaks, which I visited for the first time when Lisa Tuttle was living there. Lisa was only one of a succession of young writers that Harlan welcomed into Ellison Wonderland; Edward Bryant, James Sutherland, and Arthur Byron Cover preceded and followed her, and no doubt others I’ve forgotten. They paid no rent. All that Harlan demanded of them was that they write. These days they’d call it mentoring, I suppose. Things were less formal in those days, but the bottom line was, very few people ever went as far as Harlan when it came to encouraging and supporting young writers. He taught at Clarion almost every year in those years, and when he found a talented newcomer, he went above and beyond the call of duty in promoting him or her.

Harlan Ellison was also deeply entwined in my own beginnings in television, as it happens. It was Phil DeGuere, the executive producer and showrunner of the Twilight Zone revival of 1985-86, who first took a chance on me and gave me my first script assignment, but it was Harlan who suggested that I be given the rewrite of “The Once and Future King,” the Elvis episode that landed me a place on staff. As irony would have it, Harlan himself took over the short story I’d originally brought to Phil, a Donald Westlake story called “Nackles,” which proved to be his undoing when the CBS censors tried to rip the heart of his script, the first he’d been slated to direct. Harlan quit rather than let that happen. Lots of people talk the talk, especially in these sad sick days of the internet, but Harlan always walked the walk as well. Censorship was anathema to him.

Let there be no question; Harlan Ellison could be a difficult man. He did not brook fools gladly, and he was quick to take offense at any slight, real or perceived. Most people, as they go through life, make an enemy or two along the way… especially people who never learned to keep their voices down and their heads bowed, which was never Harlan. Harlan was the only one I’ve ever known who had so many enemies that they actually formed a club, called… of course… the Enemies of Ellison. But he had far more friends than enemies, as can be seen from all the heartfelt eulogies going up all over the internet. He was a fighter, and fighters always make enemies. He fought against censorship with the Dangerous Visionsanthologies. He fought for racial equality, marching with King at Selma. He fought for women’s rights and the ERA. He fought publishers, defending the rights of writers to control their own material and be fairly compensated for it. He served on the Board of Directors of the WGA. He gave of himself to Clarion, year after year.

Did he make mistakes? Sure he did. Was he wrong from time to time? Definitely. Who isn’t? Was he loud, opinionated, sometimes obnoxious? Oh, all of that… but he was also kind and caring and generous, and a relentless champion of excellence, free speech, and equal rights. No one goes through this life without a stumble. The question is not, “was he perfect in every way?” but rather “did he do more harm or good?” Harlan Ellison was no perfect paladin, but he left the world… and our genre… a better, richer, fairer place than he found it, in half a hundred ways… and that’s why you are seeing such an outpouring of affection for this temperamental, exhausting, relentless, raging, loving, roaring giant who lived among us for a time.

He was a complicated guy, a genius in his own way, and his muse was an angry harpy… but oh, he could write.

And that’s the thing that matters, in the end. Long after the enemies of Ellison and the friends of Ellison have all followed him to the grave, long after the criticisms and the paeans of praise have faded away and been forgotten, the stories will remain.

This is Minion Raya speaking, here to share some Wild Cards news on behalf of GRRM.

It’s June 28th and Harper Collins is releasing the Wild Cards world on the United Kingdom!That’s right- it’s Aces and Jokers across the pond. Knaves Over Queens will only be available in the UK until next year around this time when it will be released in the USA.

KNAVES OVER QUEENS, is the first ever Wild Cards novel set in the UK, and a perfect jumping-in point for readers new to this shared world – features a stunning collection of original stories from luminaries of the world of science fiction and fantasy.

PEADAR O GUILIN: “The Coming of the Crow,” “Cracks in the City,” and “Feeding on the Entrails,”

CAROLINE SPECTOR: “Needles and Pins,”

PAUL CORNELL: “Night Orders,”

CHARLES STROSS: “Police On My Back,”

MARKO KLOOS: “Probationary,”

PETER NEWMAN: “Twisted Logic,”

MELINDA M. SNODGRASS: “Ceremony of Innocence,”

EMMA NEWMAN: “How to Turn a Girl to Stone,”

MARK LAWRENCE: “The Visitor.”

The return of the famous shared-world superhero books created and edited by George R. R. Martin, who has collaborated with an ever-shifting ensemble of science fiction and fantasy icons to create the amazing Wild Cards universe.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Earth’s population was devastated by a terrifying alien virus. Those who survived were changed for ever. Some, known as Jokers, were cursed with bizarre mental and physical deformities; others, granted superhuman abilities, are known as Aces. Now the virus has reached Britain…

Queen Margaret rules over a country in which such legendary figures as Herne the Hunter, Spring-heeled Jack and Babh, the goddess of war, roam at will. Her Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill – gifted with extraordinary longevity – together with the Enigma Ace – Alan Turing – set up a special organization named the Order of the Silver Helix. They will need all the wild cards they can find if they are to deal with the terrifying mutations thrown up by the virus.

Visit the Wild Cards World Official website and social media for more information about Knaves over Queens!

It has been a few weeks since Gardner Dozois died. I’m still having a hard time coming to grips with it. He was such a huge presence in the field, such a gigantic personality, it still seems inconceivable that he’s gone. I posted about our friendship below, about the laughter he brought with him wherever he went… but I wanted to write about his legacy as an editor as well.

It’s been harder than I anticipated. Every time I start this post, it hits me all over again, and I realize that I will never see him again.

I need to say something, though. Not for Gardner — there are dozens of memorials all over the net, speaking of his talents — but for myself.

There’s really not much that I can say that has not already been said. As an editor, I think, Gardner had few peers. Over the decades our genre has been fortunate in having a succession of amazing editors: H.L. Gold, Anthony Boucher, Terry Carr, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Donald A. Wollheim, Cele Goldsmith Lalli, Ellen Datlow, Ben Bova, Ted White, Fred Pohl, and Groff Conklin all come to mind, and many more. But two figures tower above them all: John W. Campbell, the editorial genius who gave SF its Golden Age, for whom not one but two memorial awards are named… and Gardner Dozois. His stint as editor of Asimov’s can rightly be compared only with Campbell’s decades at Astounding and Analog, and was similarly influential. He discovered and nurtured more new talents than I could possibly remember or recount… among them, myself. Not at Asimov’s, no. I was already well established before Gardner got that gig. No, he found me long before, in his first editorial job… reading the slush pile at Galaxy. It was in that pile, in the summer of 1970, that he came across my short story “The Hero,” and passed it along to editor Ejler Jakobsson with a recommendation to buy. That was my first professional sale, and came during the summer between my senior and graduate years at Northwestern, when I starting to seriously contemplate what I wanted to do with my life. That sale, and the publication that followed, went a long way toward making that decision for me. It’s no exaggeration to say that I might not be where I am today if Gardner had not fished me out of the slush pile in 1970.

Many decades later, I had the honor and privilege of working beside Gardner on a series of anthologies that I am still very proud of. We were both huge Jack Vance fans, so the idea of a doing a Dying Earth anthology was a natural for us… and when Jack gave us permission, we were thrilled. SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH was a tribute anthology as well, and the best kind: one that Jack Vance was actually able to read and appreciate while he was still with us. I hope he liked reading that book (the tributes at least) as much as Gardner and I liked doing it.

I’ve never met anyone who was as well read in SF and fantasy as Gardner Dozois, but like me, that was never all he read. He loved mysteries and thrillers and historicals as well; so long as the tales were gripping and well told, he never cared what the imprint was on the spine. So the next thing we tackled after the Vance books were the crossgenre anthologies: massive books with very broad themes, featuring work from outstanding writers from a dozen different genres. WARRIORS was the first. It did so well that we soon followed it with DANGEROUS WOMEN and ROGUES. Those did even better. They won awards, got great reviews, and even more importantly, introduced thousands of readers to some great new writers they might never have encountered, if we hadn’t put them between covers with their familiar favorites. Gardner and I did a couple of fun genre mash-ups as well. There was DOWN THESE STRANGE STREETS, crossing private eye stories with fantasy and SF, and SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH, an SF/ fantasy/ romance hybrid.

Last, but definitely not least, were our two “retro SF’ collections, OLD MARS and OLD VENUS. Damn, those were fun to do. Gardner and I shared a deep deep affection for the lost solar system of our youth, the Mars of the canals and dead cities and vanished races, the Venus of endless swamps and dinosaurs and web-footed Venusians. And we discovered, to our delight, that a lot of writers shared that love, and had been waiting all their lives for a chance to set a story on the Mars and Venus of yore. Those books were easy to edit; we had to beat off writers with a stick. Both books won awards.

The sad part is, it ended there. I didn’t want it to. Neither did Gardner. I loved working with him, and we had more anthologies we wanted to do. We wanted to follow OLD MARS and OLD VENUS with OLD LUNA, and maybe down the line OLD MERCURY, or a book set in the asteroids. Done retro, like the first two. We talked about doing more crossgenre books. A second WARRIORS, a second ROGUES, a second DANGEROUS WOMEN, maybe one called VILLAINS or HEROES or (this would have been fun) SIDEKICKS. The publishers were interested. The earlier books had sold very well. Gardner was interested. I was the one who demurred. As proud as I was of those books, as much as I enjoyed working with Gardner, I did not have the time. WINDS OF WINTER was late and getting later, and the editing had taken more of my time and energy than I thought it would. “I can’t take on anything more right now,” I told him. “We’ll do them later, once I’ve delivered WINDS.” So Gardner went on to edit THE BOOK OF SWORDS and THE BOOK OF MAGIC by himself (he could have edited all these books by himself, he never actually needed me, we just enjoyed working together). I contributed stories to both books (a reprint to MAGIC, since I did not have the time). There would be plenty of time to do ROGUES 2 and OLD LUNA and SIDEKICKS and all the rest, after all. All the time we needed. Just as soon as I got King Kong off my back… we even kicked around the notion of a reprint anthology we wanted to call THE HUGO LOSERS. After all, we were the guys who founded the Hugo Losers Party… just yesterday, in 1976….

We’d do all these books tomorrow. Next month. Next year. Real soon now.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…

He’s gone now, and I fear he has taken all those books with him. I may edit other anthologies in the future (in addition to the Wild Cards series, which I imagine I’ll be editing till I join Gargy at the Great Worldcon in the Sky), but I could never bring myself to edit those particular books, the ones we had talked about doing together. It just wouldn’t feel right.

Gardner Dozois won fifteen Hugo Awards as Best Editor, a record that will never be broken, I expect. He and I won some Locus Awards and a World Fantasy Award as well, and I will always cherish those. It was an honor to know him, and to work with him. I miss him so much.

We have a new post just up on the Wild Cards blog, this one by yours truly. It was my turn in the barrel (we try to upload new content to the blog every two weeks, if not sooner), so I turned out a history of American Hero, our Wild Cards universe hit reality show — from its origins in the fevered imagination of Carrie Vaughn, through its epic first season as chronicled in Inside Straight, and on to the eight seasons that followed. Lots of cool material there that has never been published before, even in the books themselves, so this is a bit of a peek behind the curtain. I hope you’ll enjoy it. And while you’re there, check out some of the other posts on the blog as well, they’re all fascinating in their own ways.

www.wildcardsworld.com

Meanwhile, the official publication date of Wild Cards volume twenty-five, LOW CHICAGO was earlier this week. Available right now from Amazon, B&N, your favorite online bookseller, or your local bookstore. You can also order autographed copies from the Jean Cocteau Bookstore, though if you go that route you might have to wait a while to actually read the book, since it will be a few weeks until I have the chance to sign ’em.

LOW CHICAGO has been getting some terrific pre-publication reviews… from BOOKLIST, from PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY, from KIRKUS. Check them out, they’re all on line. And we’re thrilled to hear that the Science Fiction Book Club will be featuring it as a main selection. If you have never tried a Wild Cards book before, this is a great one to start with; it’s a stand-alone, so you do not need to have read any of the preceding twenty-four volumes to enjoy it. (Of course, many of those preceding twenty-four volumes are available, with autographs, from the Jean Cocteau, should this one pique your interest). The participating writers this time around include seasoned WC veterans John Jos. Miller, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kevin Andrew Murphy, and Paul Cornell, and exciting newcomers (new to Wild Cards at least) Marko Kloos, Christopher Rowe, Saladin Ahmed. That’s Marko’s new guy Khan on the cover; I like you’re going to love him.

And of course, just a few weeks down the road, Voyager will be releasing the British edition of KNAVES OVER QUEENS, volume twenty-six in the series. All new stories once again, and another terrific entry point to the series.

Oh, and there’s lots of exciting stuff happening with the Wild Cards television series we have in development… but, alas, I cannot tell you about that yet, or I would have to kill you.

There’s a lot happening these days, so much that some days it feels as if I cannot even keep up with my own life. So let me beg your indulgence for being late to the party with this news — but, yes, it is true, after more than a year of development, HBO has greenlit the first of the GAME OF THRONES successor shows that we’ve been working on, scripted by the amazing Jane Goldman.

Everybody else has already broken the news, so there’s no sense in me just rehashing. You can read all about here:

or in half a hundred other places. Pick the news outlet you like best,

To clarify, what we have here is a pilot order, not as yet a series order. Though of course we are all hoping that will follow.

Yes, this is a prequel, not a sequel. None of the characters or actors from GAME OF THRONES will appear in the new show. All of the successor shows we’ve been developing have been prequels, as I have mentioned before. This one really puts the PRE in prequel, since it is set not ninety years before GAME OF THRONES (like Dunk & Egg), or a few hundred years, but rather ten thousand years (well, assuming the oral histories of the First Men are accurate, but there are maesters at the Citadel who insist it has only been half that long). We’re very early in the process, of course, with the pilot order just in, so we don’t have a director yet, or a cast, or a location, or even a title. (My vote would be THE LONG NIGHT, which says it all, but I’d be surprised if that’s where we end up. More likely HBO will want to work the phrase “game of thrones” in there somewhere. We’ll know sooner or later).

We do have a showrunner: Jane Goldman, who penned the pilot script.

All of the news stories about the pilot being greenlit are slapping my own picture up there next to Jane’s, which is very flattering but also a little misleading Remember, they also slapped my picture up on the news stories about the TV development of Nnedi Okarafor’s WHO FEARS DEATH, when they should have been using Nnedi’s picture. I’ve consulted with all of the writers on all of the successor shows, and several of them have visited me in Santa Fe for long days of discussion, and we’ve gone back and forth in email, text, and telephone, so I have definitely been involved… but really, the accolades here should go to Jane. She has been an absolute thrill to work with… and my god, what a talent.

Those of you who are fans of not just GAME OF THRONES, but of television, film, and sf and fantasy in the broader sense are already well familiar with her work, whether you know it or not. She’s wrote the KINGSMEN movies, scripted one X-MEN film and did the story for another, did the screenplay for the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s STARDUST, and for the superhero satire KICKASS as well. Among lots of other credits. Oh, and she’s written the script for Disney’s forthcoming live action version of THE LITTLE MERMAID too. Can’t wait for that one.

I will try to keep you all informed as work progresses on the new show (whatever we end up calling it)… though, given the amount of stuff I am trying to juggle right now, news will probably break on a dozen other places before I get around to it, as happened here.

As for the other successor shows… if you have been following along, you know that we started with four, and eventually went to five. One of those has been shelved, I am given to understand, and of course Jane’s pilot is now moving to film. But that does not mean the others are dead. Three more GAME OF THRONES prequels, set in different periods and featuring different characters and storylines, remain in active development. Everything I am told indicates that we could film at least one more pilot, and maybe more than one, in the years to come. We do have an entire world and tens of thousands of years of history to play with, after all. But this is television, so nothing is certain.

(Oh, and WHO FEARS DEATH is moving along well too, and I am very excited about that one as well. Selwyn Seyfu Hinds did a terrific job with his first draft of the pilot, based on Nnedi’s novel).

(And yes, before you ask, work on WINDS OF WINTER continues, and remains my top priority. It is ridiculous to think otherwise. If I wasn’t busy with WINDS, don’t you think I’d be scripting one or more of these pilots myself? It’s not as if I’ve never written for TV… )

So cross your fingers and your toes, fantasy fans. Some good stuff is coming. And let’s have a round of applause for Jane Goldman.